Blogs & Research

If you’re a business executive and you’re feeling this way, you probably have a few questions. It’s likely that you’re wondering which channels you should invest in to get the highest return? And questioning how you can grow your customer base in the most cost-effective way possible?

This Festive Season, Effective Intelligence (EI) – South Africa’s leading direct marketing solutions provider – offers you the gift of more customers. With a crystal clear view of South Africa’s most intelligent and responsive database, we have gift-wrapped customer profiles to help you tightly define your target audiences.

Ever been in that uncomfortable situation at the end of the quarter when sales is banging on the door for more qualified prospects? The CMO is pushing to not let marketing’s reputation die yet again on meeting its promises and the sales and marketing duo is on edge.

Accurate Customer Information is the lifeblood of the customer experience – and your customer knows this. They have exchanged valuable personal information with your organisation so they expect a flawless service across channels with your company.

Big data, small data, unstructured data, silo-ed data – there is so much data about data that it’s quite difficult to know exactly where to focus your efforts in order to leverage the best possible business outcomes. Doing so requires getting down into the data dirt and scrubbing clean the imperfections that lead to poor business decisions. Yes, at the risk of being cliché – it is time for a data Spring Clean.

Effective Intelligence (EI), South Africa’s leading marketing and analytical solutions provider, announced the release of IX Real-Time 2016, the next generation of its Customer Journey hub. The platform supports real-time analytics and automated decisioning and can be implemented at unrivalled scale, speed and cost-efficiencies.

So the latest business phrase trending at the moment is “customer journeys”. Companies want to know how to create an environment in the organisation that drives outstanding customer experiences throughout their journey with the brand, so they can become “omni-channel” and ultimately – “customer-centric”. Sounds commendable and I salute you!

Hiring a PHD or data scientist will not automatically make your company an expert in the use of your company data. Neither will having too much data at your disposal give you a competitive advantage. Certainly, data collection and technical knowledge is necessary, (you have to have that bat to play the game), but business perspective is critical.

Why customer experience? Why now? Because we have entered an age when focusing on customers is more important than any other strategic imperative. Every executive knows that customers matter. But most companies don’t approach their customer interactions in a disciplined way.

IX Real-Time, powered by Kitewheel, provider of the leading Customer Journey Hub for agencies and their brand clients, today released the “State of the Consumer Journey 2016 Report. The study of over one billion real-time, cross-sector brand and customer interactions captured by the orchestration platform reveals that brands are increasingly adopting and investing in a diverse set of customer journeys across a broader range of touch points than ever before.

Having customers, especially loyal ones, is not a given these days. Competition for wallet share is fierce, therefore, being thankful for the ones you do have and working hard at retaining them may be the best strategy of all.

With so much emphasis placed on finding customers today, businesses often lose sight of keeping the one’s they do have. Thanks to social media and our digital culture, customers are in constant dialogue with us. It gives us an opportunity to change or transform our influence and experience.

Understanding the differences and similarities about your customers help you to sell more. The more you know about them and their needs, the easier it is to identify opportunities to sell them new products and target them with appropriate offers. But you know this already.

“POPI” The Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 is nearing its long awaited implementation. It looks like POPI is back on track and Parliament is proceeding to appoint the Information Regulator who should be in place by July 2016.